All fire, no smoke

Dibeyendu GangulyJun 16, 2007, 01.22am IST

In the corridor adjoining CEO Naresh Malik's offices in Pixion, there's a row of rooms labelled SMOKE1, SMOKE2, up to SMOKE9. Behind the doors, one imagines frizzy-haired film-makers lounging about in T-shirts and jeans, intensely discussing their art over coffee and cigarettes. Not so. The SMOKE rooms, it turns out, are named after the software package Pixion uses to add the finishing touches to its client's films.

In one such room, they are removing an unfortunate pimple from Kareena Kapoor's cheek in a song sequence. In another, they're colour tinting Sudhir Misra's Khoya Khoya Chand to give it a 1950s look. In a third, they're creating special effects for Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking, making a character disappear in a wisp of smoke. "The Indian film industry's appetite for special effects is increasing," says Malik. "We are expanding to keep pace."

Squeezed between the glamorous worlds of film production and film exhibition and peopled by computer geeks who talk in IT acronyms, post-production is boring, but it is booming. Earlier, the industry was largely sustained by advertising film makers, who needed to put that extra sheen on the hair seen in shampoo ads and add extra sparkle on the teeth seen in toothpaste ads. But now that Bollywood has jumped on the bandwagon, the scope of the business is widening.

Though the technology used is basically the same, the move from small screen to big screen post-production means more processing power, more people and more cash, and the major players are all scaling up.

Pixion, for one, has just taken over two more floors in the prominent building that houses its corporate office in downtown Bandra, and Malik says, "Since production houses are making seven films at a time, post-production companies also need to have volume. Our strategy is to offer the full range of services, from editing to visual effects, so the client gets everything under one roof."

The post-production majors have actually made the transition to a corporate setup much faster than Bollywood's production houses. "It is because we have been servicing the advertising industry, where the dealings are professional and above board," says Amit Gupta, one of the founders of Pixion, who has since joined industry leader Prime Focus as director for corporate development.

Prime Focus has emerged a darling of the stock markets, growing at 33% and logging a net profit of Rs 16 crore on revenues of Rs 44.6 crore for the nine months ending December 2006. Last year, it stunned everyone by acquiring a majority stake in VTR, one of London's biggest post-production companies. Through VTR, it bagged the contract for 28 Weeks Later, a recently released British film about a virus that strikes London, forcing the authorities to quarantine the city and then napalm-bomb it.

The visual affects work here involved painstakingly removing all the people and cars from London's crowded streets in each frame and then more advanced mastering like the aerial napalm bombing. "Earlier, we would have just got the lower end grunge work in India," says Gupta. "Now we are doing the more advanced work as well."

The first step in modern day post-production is DI or the digital intermediate process, which converts the film into digital format in order to manipulate it on the computer. As in the case of most computer enabled processes, the costs of DI have been falling steadily over the years, but it is still not cheap. Gupta puts a ball park figure of Rs 1 crore as the cost of DI for an average Indian feature film, of which Rs 60 lakh would be for the digitisation and Rs 40 lakh for basic mastering.

UTV, which has been servicing the post-production market for advertising films for the past 12 years, set up UTV Post, a separate company for feature films, four months ago. The new company has done four films, of which one is the in-house production Metro.

Says UTV founder-director Deven Khote, "In India, we are still far away from doing really high-end visual effect films like Spiderman, but the DI end of the market is booming and is good enough to make steady profits. India makes 600-odd films a year and 30% of them are currently DI. In a year or two, I expect all Indian films will be DI."

Krrish is considered to be Bollywood's breakthrough special-effects film, but not too many movies have used such high-grade effects since then. In an effort to get the market for visual effects-led films going, Prime Focus produced Gayab and Vaah-Life Ho To Aisi, neither of which were major hits. "We have now decided to stay off production and stick to post-production services," says Gupta. "But we are doing some advanced visual effects for other producers, like Love Story 2050, a futuristic film."